Written submission on the project on open collaborative
projects, contained in document CDIP/6/6

Committee on Development and Intellectual Property: Sixth Session, Geneva, November 22, 2010 to November 26, 2010.

Summary: FSFE welcomes the orientation WIPO is taking
towards the study of open and collaborative models but notes that the list
of projects to be studied is incomplete for it doesn't include Free Software
nor projects like Creative Commons or Wikipedia which have the longer experience
in the field of collaborative project.The inclusion of such projects is
necessary to have a good level of insight in the topic.

Written submission by Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)

We highly welcome the proposal for a project on open collaborative
projects, contained in document CDIP/6/6. We believe that WIPO will in
future have an important role in this area, among other things in
advising member states on how obtain the maximum benefits for their
citizens and companies from such models.

We appreciate that the project is proposed to be structured as an
interactive platform, and hope that it will be open for
contributions from all stakeholders. However, the selection of
collaborative project to be studied in depth strikes us as odd. We
are deeply surprised not to find Free Software (also known as open
source) or any Free Software projects among the the collaborative
projects to be investigated.

Free Software predates most of the projects listed in the proposal
for detailed investigation by a full two decades. Rather than
being structured around a single company or entity, it has grown
into a large and complex ecosystem with numerous different methods
for collaboration, and is at the cutting edge of the latest
developments in copyright and patent law, as well as in
standardisation. Bringing together both global corporations and
individual developers on hugely complicated technical projects,
with the GNU/Linux operating system alone poised to underpin a 50
billion USD economy in 2011, Free Software is likely the most
mature example of an open collaborative project that is currently
available to us. At the same time, it is exceedingly well
researched, and huge amounts of data are publicly available.

Similar considerations apply for other projects, such as the Creative
Commons model for copyright licensing and the online encyclopedia
Wikipedia.

We are therefore of the view that a project like the project like the
one proposed in document CDIP/6/6 would be highly incomplete if it did
not take these world-renowned examples of collaborative projects into
consideration. Unless it does so, this project will not deliver the
level of insight which member states rightly hope to reap from their
investment in this project.